DOCSLIB.ORG

On Claude Lefort's

Total Page：16

File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb

Download full-text PDF Read full-text
On Claude Lefort's chapter 3 Frame: On Claude Lefort’s ‘L’Expérience Prolétarienne’ Socialisme ou Barbarie saw a new ‘problématique’ for revolutionary the- ory emerging from the East Berlin uprising and the French general strike of Summer 1953. Central to this new problématique was the elaboration of a notion of autonomy. Socialisme ou Barbarie’s initial understanding of the term designated strike actions that workers carried out beyond the control of, and in opposition to, the bureaucratic trade unions and political parties that adopted direct-democratic forms of self-organisation. The group connected direct democracy to the potentials continually posited in the course of the conflicts that shape everyday worker experience on the factory floor. Claude Lefort’s 1952 essay ‘L’experience prolétarienne’, outlines the way to understand that experience. For the moment, suffice it to say that the group conceptu- alised this experience as being shaped by the basic contradiction of bureau- cratic capitalism, and as following from the worker response and resistance to its effects. Actions like the East Berlin ‘June Days’ and the August PTT strike were both expressions of these conflicts and experiences that made linkages explicit. In their modes of self-organisation and the collective formulation of demands, autonomous actions were the ‘germ’ of revolution ‘from below’. The task of revolutionary theory was to comprehend, clarify, and situate this ‘germ’ by connecting it, on the one hand, back to the everyday experience at the point of production and, on the other, to a vision of revolution and of direct- democratic socialism. The task of revolutionary politics was to make this theo- retical project as widely available as possible in order to help the ‘worker avant garde’ become more self-reflexive on the question of organisation, and more cognisant of the revolutionary implications of their actions. ‘L’experience prolétarienne’ outlines a project for Socialisme ou Barbarie rooted in a vision of the worker and of worker experience that is derived from reading and interpreting ‘proletarian-documentary literature’. The project is the temporal inverse of the group’s collective approach to autonomous worker actions. In the latter, aspects of autonomous worker actions were linked ret- rospectively to conflicts that arose in the ordinary experience of production. Lefort proposes a time-forward form of revolutionary political action that presupposes a distinction between manifest and latent dimensions of worker experience and situates the dissemination of a comparative analysis and © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���4 | doi ��.��63/9789004�35373_�05 106 chapter 3 interpretation of worker narratives as a production of social-imaginary signi- fications that could unify and transform this latent register into the subjective basis of a form of proletarian class consciousness. Because of Lefort’s positions on organisation, for him there was a strict sep- aration between what working people could write about, from ‘inside’, about their experience at the point of production and what revolutionary militants, who are outside of that experience, could otherwise access. From this follows the centrality of worker-autobiographical narratives. The second part of this chapter considers this source-material directly. Lefort envisioned Socialisme ou Barbarie’s primary role in revolutionary politics as consisting of collecting and disseminating a wide range of these narratives, supplemented by com- parative analyses and interpretations alongside systemic critiques of contem- porary capitalism. But for reasons that will be touched on here, and explored in more detail in Chapter Five, the collection never materialised. Workers simply did not write. The second section examines some of the consequences of this unforeseen limitation. I analyse Paul Romano and Eric Albert’s first-person accounts of experience at the point of production as literary constructions that produced a specific ‘realism effect’ through the use of particular generic and linguistic conventions. By doing this, I hope to introduce a certain insta- bility into the relation, which Socialisme ou Barbarie took as unproblematic, between shop-floor experience and its textual representation. Claude Lefort’s ‘L’experience prolétarienne’ (1952) The schema that ordered Socialisme ou Barbarie’s conception of revolution relied upon the close examination of working-class experience. This put the group in little-explored territory. Even though traditional Marxism placed the proletariat at the conceptual and political center of its concerns, its treatment of the working class as the embodied expression of abstract economic forces foreclosed close analysis of concrete relations of production. It also evacu- ated questions of how the proletariat could act as a revolutionary agent by conceiving of revolution as a quasi-automatic result of contradictions that played out at the level of ‘objective forces’.1 French ‘human sciences’ had not yet begun producing researchers who took the French working class as a legiti- mate object of study. Through the 1950s, anthropology was dominated on the one hand by research on the ‘exotic’, and on the other by the conflict between structural anthropology and philosophy over which discipline ‘owned’ episte- 1 Lefort 1952. Reprinted as Lefort 1979a. Reference here is to Lefort 1979a, p. 74..
Load more

Recommended publications
  • Rethinking the French Liberal Moment: Some Thoughts on the Heterogeneous Origins of Lefort and Gauchet's Social Philosophy
    CHAPTER 3 Rethinking the French Liberal Moment: Some Thoughts on the Heterogeneous Origins of Lefort and Gauchet’s Social Philosophy Noah Rosenblum ecent scholarship has taken an interest in the renaissance of French liberal thought in the second half of the twentieth century. This R“French liberal revival” has swept up scholars and commentators alike, and is often thought to include the important French philosophers Claude Lefort and Marcel Gauchet. But, as work in intellectual history has shown,1 the term sits uneasily on at least these two. On close examination, we see that some of their mature thought is only ambiguously committed to liberal goals and rests on complex philosophical premises that are incompatible with some traditional liberal arguments. Tracing aspects of their social thought back to its roots reveals how deeply opposed to liberalism some of their premises were and helps us see how they carried illiberal ideas forward into new contexts. This forces us to take a new perspective on at least this piece of the twentieth century’s French liberal moment, revising accepted stories of its origins and meaning. Recognizing the heterogeneous sources of their argument leads us to appreciate Lefort and Gauchet’s creative work of reconstruction and resist the urge to canalize their powerful social philosophy. Conceptualizing the “French Liberal Revival” In a purely analytic sense, we can understand the idea of a “French liberal revival” in two different ways. The phrase describes, first, a new or renewed interest in traditional liberal themes by thinkers writing in French. We can S. W. Sawyer et al.
    [Show full text]
  • Socialisme Ou Barbarie: a French Revolutionary Group (1949-65)
    Socialisme ou Barbarie: A French Revolutionary Group (1949-65) Marcel van der Lindenl In memory of Cornelius Castoriadis, 11 March 1922 - 26 December 1997 The political and theoretical views developed by the radical group Socialisme ou Barbarie from 1949 onward, have only recently received some attention outside the French speaking world.2 For a long period things were little different in France where the group and its similarly named periodical also received scant attention. This only changed after the students' and workers' rebellion in May- June 1968. The remnants of the journal, which had been unsaleable up to then - it had stopped appearing three years earlier - suddenly became a hot-selling item. Many of the 'heretical' ideas published in it seemed to be confirmed by the unexpected revolt. In 1977 the daily Le Monde wrote on the intellectual efforts of Socialisme ou Barbarie: "This work - aIthough unknown to the public at large -has nevertheless had a powerful influence on those who played a role in May 1968." In the writings of the group one finds "most of the ideas which are being debated nowadays (from workers' control through to the critique of modern technology, of Bolshevism or of mar^)."^ In Socialisme ou Barbarie an attempt was made to consider the bureaucra- tization of social movements. The central questions were: is it an iron law that movements opposing the existing order either fall apart or change into rigid hierarchies? How can militants organize themselves without being absorbed or rigidified into a bureaucratic apparatus? Socialisme ou Barbarie first posed these questions because the group asked itself why things had gone wrong in the traditional labour movement.
    [Show full text]
  • Politics2021
    politics 2021 new and recent titles I polity Page 7 Page 13 Page 13 Page 3 Page 11 Page 7 Page 51 Page 2 Page 6 CONTENTS Ordering details General Politics ............................................ 2 Books can be ordered through our website www.politybooks.com or via: Customer Care Center, John Wiley & Sons Inc. Introductory Texts ....................................... 16 9200 KEYSTONE Crossing STE 800 INDIANAPOLIS, IN 46209-4087 Toll-Free: (877) 762-2974 Fax: (877) 597-3299 Global and Comparative Politics .................. 18 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. European Distribution Centre, New Era Estate, Oldlands Way, Environmental Politics ................................. 19 Bognor Regis, WEST SUSSEX. PO22 9NQ, UK Freephone (UK only): 0800 243407 Overseas callers: +44 1243 843291 Political Economy ....................................... 22 Fax: +44 (0) 1243 843302 Email: [email protected] For Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Luxembourg and Liechtenstein: War and International Security ..................... 28 Phone: +49 6201 606152 Fax: +49 6201 606184 Email: [email protected] Conflict Resolution and Peacebuilding .......... 29 For Australia, New Zealand and Pacific Islands: Toll-free within Australia: 1800 777 474 Toll-free with New Zealand: 0800 448 200 Phone: +61 7 33548455 Development and and Human Rights ............ 30 UK and European Politics ............................ 31 Inspection Copies Most paperback editions featured in this catalogue are Russian Politics ........................................... 32 available for inspection. A maximum of three books may be considered for relevant courses with at least 12 students. A reply form must be returned to this effect. Middle Eastern Politics ................................ 33 Phone (US & Canada): (800) 225-5945 Email: ccopy@wiley,com Freephone (UK only): 0800 243407 Email: [email protected] Phone (Rest of World): +44 1243 843294 Asian Politics .............................................
    [Show full text]
  • Introducing Claude Lefort: from the Critique of Totalitarianism to the Politics of Democracy
    Introducing Claude Lefort: From the Critique of Totalitarianism to the Politics of Democracy Dick Howard Author’s Introduction, 2007 In 1998, Claude Lefort received the Hannah Arendt Prize given by the City-State of Bremen and co-sponsored with the Heinrich Boell Stiftung of the German Green Party. I was asked to deliver the Laudatio before a mixed public consisting of political figures, university faculty and students, and a general public. As the Laudatio is not a typical American form of oral presentation, I had a great deal of difficulty in constructing the attached talk to fit within the constraints of the occasion. In this English translation, by Eunah Lee, I have taken the liberty of smoothing out the written presentation, adapting some points to make them clearer (or more problematic, as it sometimes seemed necessary). The original text was published in the monthly journal, Kommune; a stripped down version (dropping the formalities of addressing the Sehr geehrten officials who were present), from which this translation was made, was published in a pamphlet edited by the Bremen Boell Stiftung under the title if Politik und Moderne, Band IV, under the title ‘Von der Kritik des Totalitarismus zur Politik der Demokratie,’ pp. 17-22. I have resisted the temptation to update this nearly ten year-old text, which seems to me to stand on its own. It should be noted, however, that Lefort has just published a thousand-page collection of his hitherto un-collected writings that cover a period of 60 years as Le temps présent. Écrits 1945-2005 (Paris: Belin, 2007).
    [Show full text]
  • The Case of the French Review Socialisme Ou Barbarie (1948-1965)
    Journalism and Mass Communication, September 2016, Vol. 6, No. 9, 499-511 doi: 10.17265/2160-6579/2016.09.001 D DAVID PUBLISHING Acting and Thinking as a Revolutionary Organ: The Case of the French Review Socialisme ou Barbarie (1948-1965) Christophe Premat Stockholm University, Stockholm, Sweden The aim of the article is to analyze the evolution of a radical left group in France that created a scission inside the Fourth International after World War II. The group founded a review Socialisme ou Barbarie that criticized Marxism and the Trotskyist interpretation of the status of the USSR. The rigorous description of this review reveals the mixture of strong theoretical views on bureaucratic societies and empirical investigations of reactions against those societies. The hypothesis is that this group failed to be a new political force. As a matter of fact, is it possible to depict the evolution of Socialisme ou Barbarie as an investigative journalism based on a strong political and philosophical theory? Keywords: Bureaucratic societies, Sovietologist, investigative journalism, Socialisme ou Barbarie, Castoriadis, political periodicals Introduction The review Socialisme ou Barbarie is a political act refusing the Trotskyist interpretation of the USSR regime as a degenerated worker State. It comes from an ideological scission inside the Fourth International and was cofounded by the Greek exilé Cornelius Castoriadis and Claude Lefort. It is characterized by an early understanding of the nature of the USSR. Socialisme ou Barbarie is first a tendency inside the Fourth International before being a review and a real revolutionary group. The review existed from 1948 until 1965 whereas the group Socialisme ou Barbarie continued to exist until 1967.
    [Show full text]
  • The Concept of Totalitarianism
    The concept of totalitarianism Claude Lefort The collapse of communism in the Soviet Union has not put an end to the long- standing debate over the pertinence of the concept of totalitarianism or on its more or less limited usage. [1] Its physiognomy has, however, changed. Uncertainties over the future of the Soviet regime no longer weigh down on protagonists of the concept as they once did and science has taken the lead over political judgement, even though it sometimes retains the imprint of the old ideological oppositions. Discussions now tend to revolve around the circle of historians. What seems to me more remarkable is the persistence of the objections and reservations to characterising the communist system as totalitarian, or more generally to the idea of a new social formation emerging beneath the opposed traits of communism and fascism. Some of the arguments advanced under the sign of scientific rigour deserve to be examined inasmuch as they can help us to clarify the problem. I shall discuss four of these arguments: (i) communism and fascism are fundamentally different; (ii) the totalitarian phenomenon can only be detected in Germany and Russia during limited periods; (iii) the concept, as suggestive as it may be, has no practical value for the historian; (iv) it only becomes pertinent if it is introduced as an ideal- type in the Weberian sense of the term. First argument: the characterisation of fascism and communism as two sides of a new social formation renders incomprehensible the radical opposition between the ideologies which informs them. The position appears to be even less permissible in the light of the observation that ideology is indeed constitutive of each of the regimes whose kinship is affirmed.
    [Show full text]
  • A Civil Society
    Southern Illinois University Carbondale OpenSIUC Follow this and additional works at: https://opensiuc.lib.siu.edu/histcw_cs IssuedA Civil Society:under a TheCC B PublicY-NC-ND Space 4.0 license:of Freemason https:/ /creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0 Women in France, 1744-1944 Creative Works A Civil Society explores the struggle to initiate women as full participants in the masonic brotherhood that shared in the rise of France’s civil society and its civic morality on behalf of 4-9-2021 women’s rights. As a vital component of the third sector during France’s modernization, Afreemasonr Civil Society:y empower Theed women Public in complex Space social of networks,Freemason contributing Women to a mor ine liberFrance,al republic, a more open society, and a more engaged public culture. The1744-1944 work shows that although women initially met with stiff resistance, their induction into the brotherhood was a significant step in the development of French civil society and its civic James Allen Southernmorality, Illinoisincluding Univ theersity pr omotionCarbondale of, [email protected]’s rights in the late nineteenth century. Pulling together the many gendered facets of masonry, Allen draws from periodicals, memoirs, and copious archival material to account for the rise of women within the masonic brotherhood in the context of rapid historical change. Thanks to women’s social networks and their attendant social capital, masonry came to play a leading role in French civil society and the rethinking of gender relations in the public sphere. “James Smith Allen presents readers with an engaging, kaleidoscopic account of the uphill and contentious struggle to include select women as full participants in the arcane brotherhood of French freemasonry.”—Karen Offen, author of Debating the Woman Question in the French Third Republic, 1870–1920 “A Civil Society is important because it connects the activism and writing of major figures in French women’s history with masonic networks and impulses.
    [Show full text]
  • Mohira Suyarkulova Phd Thesis
    BECOMING SOVEREIGN IN POST-SOVIET CENTRAL ASIA: 'DISCURSIVE ENCOUNTERS' BETWEEN TAJIKISTAN AND UZBEKISTAN Mohira Suyarkulova A Thesis Submitted for the Degree of PhD at the University of St Andrews 2011 Full metadata for this item is available in St Andrews Research Repository at: http://research-repository.st-andrews.ac.uk/ Please use this identifier to cite or link to this item: http://hdl.handle.net/10023/3159 This item is protected by original copyright Becoming Sovereign in post-Soviet Central Asia ‘Discursive encounters’ between Tajikistan and Uzbekistan Mohira Suyarkulova This dissertation is submitted in fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the School of International Relations, University of St Andrews March 2011 Candidate’s declaration I, Mohira Suyarkulova, hereby certify that this thesis, which is approximately 76,214 words in length, has been written by me, that it is the record of work carried out by me and that it has not been submitted in any previous application for a higher degree. I was admitted as a research student in February 2007 and as a candidate for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in May 2008; the higher study for which this is a record was carried out in the University of St Andrews between 2007 and 2011. I received assistance in the writing of this thesis in respect of language, grammar, spelling and syntax, which was provided by Simon Taylor. Date …….......................................... Signature of candidate ………....................................................... Supervisor’s declaration I hereby certify that the candidate has fulfilled the conditions of the Resolution and Regulations appropriate for the degree of Doctor of Philosopy in the University of St Andrews and that the candidate is qualified to submit this thesis in application for that degree.
    [Show full text]
  • The Possibilities and Limits of Democracy in Late Modernity
    ABSTRACT Title of Dissertation: BECAUSE WE WILL IT: THE POSSIBILITIES AND LIMITS OF DEMOCRACY IN LATE MODERNITY Lawrence James Olson, Doctor of Philosophy, 2006 Dissertation directed by: Professor Vladimir Tismaneanu Department of Government and Politics Cornelius Castoriadis’ life can be characterized as one of engaged dissent. As a founding member of the Socialisme ou Barbarie group in France, Castoriadis maintained a consistent position as an opponent of both Western capitalism and Soviet totalitarianism during the Cold War. This position also placed Castoriadis in opposition to the mainstream French left, particularly Jean-Paul Sartre, who supported the French Communist Party and defended the Soviet Union. After the dissolution of the group, Castoriadis continued to assert the possibility of constructing participatory democratic institutions in opposition to the existing bureaucratic capitalist institutional structure in the Western world. The bureaucratic-capitalist institutional apparatus of the late modern era perpetuates a system where the individual is increasingly excluded from the democratic political process and isolated within the private sphere. However, the private sphere is not a refuge from the intrusion of the bureaucratic-capitalist imaginary, which consistently seeks to subject the whole of society to rational planning. Each individual is shaped by his relationship to the bureaucracy; on the one hand, his relationships with other become subjected to an instrumental calculus, while at the same time, the individual seeks to find some meaning for the world around him by turning to the private sphere. Furthermore, a crisis of meaning pervades late modern societies, where institutions are incapable of providing answers to the questions posed to them by individuals living in these societies.
    [Show full text]
  • Reiner Schürmann and Cornelius Castoriadis Between Ontology and Praxis
    Anarchist Developments in Cultural Studies ISSN: 1923-5615 2013.2: Ontological Anarché: Beyond Materialism and Idealism Reiner Schürmann and Cornelius Castoriadis Between Ontology and Praxis John W.M. Krummel ABSTRACT Every metaphysic, according to Reiner Schürmann, involves the positing of a first principle for thinking and doing whereby the world becomes intelligible and masterable. What happens when such rules or norms no longer have the power they previously had? According to Cornelius Castoriadis, the world makes sense through institutions of imaginary significations. What happens when we discover that these significations and institutions truly are imaginary, without ground? Both thinkers begin their ontologies by acknowledging a radical finitud e that threatens to destroy meaning or order. For Schürmann it is the ontological anarchy revealed between epochs when principles governing modes of thinking and doing are foundering but new principles to take their place have not yet emerged. For Castoria dis it is chaos that names the indetermination- determination that governs the unfolding of the socio-historical with contingency and unpredictability. And yet for both thinkers their respective ontologies have political or ethical implications. On the basis of the anarchy of being, Schürmann unfolds an anarchic praxis or ethos of “living without why.” And on the basis of his notion of being as chaos, Castoriadis develops his political praxis of autonomy. The challenge for both is this move from ontology to practical philosophy, how to bridge theory and practice. The key for both seems to be a certain ontologically derived sense of freedom. In this paper, I analyze and compare their respective thoughts, and pursue the question of how anarchy or chaos and the implied sense of an ontological freedom might be made viable and sensible for human praxis, how radical finitude in the face of ontological groundlessness might nevertheless serve to situate a viable political praxis.
    [Show full text]
  • Democracy Against: the Antinomies of Politics
    Democracy Against: The Antinomies of Politics Bryan Nelson A Dissertation submitted to the Faculty of Graduate Studies in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy Graduate Program in Social and Political Thought York University Toronto, Ontario April 2017 © Bryan Nelson, 2017 ii Abstract How should democracy be thought? How do we go about organising its concept? On what basis? And to what end? Rather than confine democracy to an ancient political constitution or modern system of government, this dissertation pursues a conception of democracy often concealed by the customary institutional analysis. Written as a sustained appraisal of the often antagonistic encounter between philosophy and politics, as a strategy to reframe democracy an emancipatory, transformative agency of the demos, it is proposed that the topic of democracy be initiated according to what democracy is against. This approach serves to entirely reconsider the question of democracy, engendering a renewed interpretation of what the “power of the people” can mean. Through a series of detailed studies of Jacques Rancière, Claude Lefort and Miguel Abensour, it is argued that democracy invariably appears as a counter or objection to an established social order in which a spectrum of familiar modes of domination are already in place. As the initiation of a unique political controversy and dispute, democracy is presented as an unprecedented challenge to unrestricted and arbitrary rule, concentrations of authority, strategies of inequality and hierarchies of all kinds. It is identified with the forces that seek to expose, contest and transform oppressive and exclusionary iii arrangements and practices from below, from the outside, from a minoritarian positionality.
    [Show full text]
  • Sartre Was Not a Marxist
    Sartre was not a Marxist ALFRED BETSCHART Abstract: Ronald Aronson praises Jean-Paul Sartre’s existential Marx- ism in an essay in the Boston Review. I argue that existential Marxism is a case of a contradictio in adiecto. Sartre was never recognized as a Marxist by his contemporaries. He not only failed to show any inter- est in the question of economic exploitation, but most of the answers he gave in the Critique even contradicted Marxist theory. His expres- sion of Marxism as the philosophy of our time seems to have rather been more an act of courtesy than the expression of deep conviction. As Sartre himself later said, Marxism and existentialism are quite sepa- rate philosophies. Keywords: anarchism, communism, existentialism, Marx, Marxism, radicalism, Sartre Marxism has seen a revival in recent years with preeminent works such as Slavoj Žižek’s The Relevance of the Communist Manifesto (2019), Terry Eagleton’s Why Marx Was Right (2011), and Alain Badiou’s The Communist Hypothesis (2009/2010). In fall 2018, Ron Aronson published a remarkable essay with the title: “The Philoso- phy of Our Time,”1 in which he praises Jean-Paul Sartre’s existential Marxism as a possible “philosophical foundation for today’s revital- ized critiques of capitalism.” Aronson writes about Sartre’s turn from his early individualism with his emphasis on absurdity, freedom, and responsibility to Marxism—of course, not a Stalinist version of Marxism, but a rather special version—existential Marxism. My the- sis in this essay is that terms such as existential or existentialist Marx- ism or Marxist existentialism are cases of a contradictio in adiecto.
    [Show full text]